Need
by inkfiction
Summary: She's supposed to be you, but would she ever understand the need that plagues you, that keeps you up at night? You want what can never be. You know that very well. Yet the need expands...


_A/N: I began this as something completely different one night at the end of March but as I took pen to paper, it went ahead and wrote itself even though I wasn't really going for the abstract angst thing. This is from Liv's POV and pretty much self-explanatory. Credit goes to Beanz the Mighty (slightlyambivalent) for the influence. Any feedback is welcome!_

[…]

Need.

When it is so real and all-consuming, it hardly ever takes anything to ignite it. A stray thought. An abstract look. A whispered word. A simple touch.

A seed, a spark, a flame which blooms into a full-blown fire.

Gold-flecked green eyes glancing at you from beneath frowning blond brows. A questioning look, a raised eyebrow. Lips pursed in — what? Thought? Disapproval? Anger? Amusement?

You look away.

Concentrate. Focus on the work at hand. Your tab makes tiny beeps which oddly synchronize with your heartbeat. Blood pounds — thud, thudthud, thud — in your ears. Words blur. Letters disappear, reappear. For a brief while you understand what it's like to be dyslexic.

She passes you a paper. Some list. Your fingers touch.

Electricity.

A billion tiny jolts which zap up your arms and center somewhere in the pit of your stomach. A billion delicious little shivers run up and down your spine. Names dance on the list in your hands and your breathing stops.

Silence.

You look up. Her brows arch. The momentary concern in her eyes is overcome by disdain in an instant. You don't know which look is real and which was deliberately crafted.

Back to work. Life was so much easier before this damnable truce. Now it seems like you're just losing your grip on sanity — and propriety.

You make it through the evening. At least you think so. Head home. Silence welcomes you in your apartment, like the walls are sulking and frowning at you with disapproval. You can empathize. You stare at the mold growing on the stale loaf of bread in your refrigerator for two minutes, take a lonely shower and huddle in bed — your thoughts fixed across the universe and crossing the boundary from weird and insane to insanely inappropriate.

You dream of hands and lips and a voice that mirrors your own. Velvet soft words caress you and you are lost. You have wings. You climb high, high, high — and then fall abruptly, hard. You wake up clutching a pillow and breathing shallowly, your heart beating hard against a wall of need, an ache that encompasses the whole of you. Fresh salt stains appear on the snow-white pillow, and you feel like you are drowning in your king-sized bed, between your thousand-count sheets. Sleep eludes you and you get to watch another mindlessly beautiful sunrise — the promise of a new day heavy against your chest.

The mirror tells you your eyes are dull and the shadows around them have darkened. The mirror can't show the ache that gnaws at your insides, hollowing you out. The sheer need that expands with every heartbeat. Enough to kill you, but not enough to let you die. Another day. Play the game again. The hunter, the prey, the hunter, the prayer. Let her hate you, you've made it plenty easy so far.

But you wonder if you really deserve to be hated like this. At the time you did what you had to, what was asked of you. You did your job. If today somebody led you back to the past, you don't think you'd change a thing. But even so, regret raises its head every now and then and the hatred in her eyes is so eloquent, it stings. And you wonder would she have done things differently if your places had been exchanged. You wonder about a lot of things.

About lips, fingers. Hands.

Touch.

Taste.

Smell.

All of them; separate and together. Exciting and overwhelming. And far out of your reach. She's supposed to be _you_, but would she ever understand the need that plagues you, that keeps you up at night? You want what can never be. You know that very well. Yet the need expands, hangs over your head like an invisible dark cloud, leeching life and color from everything around you, from you. It refuses to disperse. Gets stronger every day.

The emptiness nags at you and you can't find anything to fill that void even though you have options. Lincoln looks at you with hurt-puppy eyes and you feel sad and disgusted with yourself, but you can't help it. However much you want, try, you can't make yourself fall for the safe, the acceptable option.

Sometimes you wonder if it's worth it. The pain, the heartache, the sheer torture. Sometimes you wonder why you don't just quit. Let go. Stop coming here. Request to be reassigned to somewhere boring and quiet. Like Odessa or Jackson. Somewhere in Alaska, maybe.

But then there are times, tiny moments, when she forgets she hates you and throws a little smile in your direction — fleeting, small, before her reality checks in with her again and she snatches it back at once. But a little corner in your heart is filled with little, hurriedly abandoned smiles and you cherish them with an intensity that's terrible and kind of pathetic but very dear to you, nonetheless. For now you're just thankful you have that.

[…]

_A/N: That's all I have for now, I'm afraid. And yes, I see Liv as someone who would splurge on thousand-count sheets. Now, go ahead and hit that review button down below. _


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